By Sarah Bryan Miller
“In the planning stages of my pieces I constantly keep in front of me the image of my musicians and their audience bored to death. So I ask myself, “What can I do to make this 10, 15, 20, 25 minutes interesting to my public? When will their interest flag, and what can I do to restore it? What purpose will this piece serve which has not been fulfilled by several other pieces by other composers?”‘
JB: When I was a young man I progressed through all the historical periods–I’d write like Mozart, and I’d write like Beethoven, and I wrote like George Gershwin for a little while. When I got to college I was immediately put on a kind of contrapuntal 12-tone method. For a solid year and a half I was on that discipline. As a sophomore, a trio I wrote won the BMI competition. I got a weekend in New York and got $1,000–which was a huge amount of money in 1957. There was a luncheon in my honor, and I came away with quite a swelled head.
JB: Anything can be described mathematically. A computer can plot a picture of the Mona Lisa on the screen, and you can convert that to numbers. And you can do the same thing with Mozart. I saw an article a couple of years ago about a Japanese scientist who had found that a certain number of mathematical elements in the DNA chain could be converted into music that sounded very much like Mozart. Very, very strange.
There were a lot of really good musicians in that band–this was the beginning of the Vietnam war. I found that I enjoyed working with performing musicians, and I think that’s probably what’s shaped my music ever since. I like being able to make use of the peculiarities of a particular instrument. And when you take composition away from the domain of mathematics–which is what serial composition is all about–then it’s no longer wrong to change a couple of notes. If I find that a clarinetist, for instance, can’t play loudly enough in the weak part of his register I can change the notes. But if you change a couple of notes in a 12-tone piece you destroy the whole structure.
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SBM: It was a killer for the voice too. A lot of singers were eager to trash Glass.
